Good without God: Atheist churches offer non-believers community and ritual without faith

Atheist churches offer non-believers community and ritual without faith

CALGARY — As a strict evangelical Christian, Korey Peters had long been taught there was only one way to confront serious personal issues. He was taught to pray.

“I was taught that if you were having life issues, you should just pray about it and God would help me through,” he said. “I was having difficult times and doing a lot of praying and things got worse.’’

Calgary Secular Church’s Ten Commandments

1: Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

2: In all things, strive to cause no harm.

3: Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

4: Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

5: Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

6: Always seek to be learning something new.

7: Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

8: Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.

9: Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

10: Question everything.

Mr. Peters said he was having trouble finding work, struggling after a hasty move to Florida from Calgary about a decade ago. “I was very stressed out, my blood pressure was off the charts. I thought: ‘If I keep going like this, I’m going to kill myself.’”

Then he tried something new. He said he put his his preachers-and-hellfire faith aside — and he never felt better. Six years later, he was an atheist.

“It just makes so much sense, rejecting faith, I found so much joy and happiness being a secular person. The moral argument one can make from a secular standpoint is so vastly superior to the one you can make from a religious point of view,” he said. “I wanted to be a good person, involved in humanitarian work, I loved the ceremony, the beauty, the joy of the [church], surrounded by wonderful people. But I just couldn’t stomach the faith anymore. I hated having to make those compromises in my mind.”

After several years living the godless life, Mr. Peters and his wife, who was raised an Anglican, were at peace with their decision. But they missed the church. They missed the community and the music and the rituals, all the little rites of passage and shared moments — usually provided by religious ceremonies — that make a community whole.

“When you lose faith, you cancel yourself out of the church culture and the church culture is huge in western culture.”

So about six months ago he decided to start the Calgary Secular Church, signing on to an international trend of non-theistic people who are seeking the entirely earthly comforts once reserved for the ecumenical.

Mr. Peters put his group together by starting a Facebook group and asking his friends to attend. On Sundays, they gather in a semi-circle in a rented room at the Green Fools Theatre in Calgary to affirm their self-created Ten Commandments. and share their experiences as secular people. On Tuesdays the varying congregation holds a pub night.

There are humanist organizations that hold regular meetings and offer church-like services in most provinces; in January in London, U.K., the Sunday Assembly, an atheist church, began offering services to skeptics and freethinkers in a deconsecrated former temple. According to the BBC, the congregants sang Queen songs, read Alice in Wonderland and listened to a presentation on anti-matter theory.

Titles of this rapidly growing group vary: atheist, agnostic, humanist. What they increasingly have in common is a desire for churches and the other rights of the religious without what many would consider to be the essential element: God.

It may seem puzzling to the religious, concedes Gail McCabe, a retired sociology professor and humanist chaplain at the University of Toronto and past president and spokesperson for the Ontario Humanist Society.

But for non-theists, this all separates very neatly.

“Basically, religion is, in fact, a social institution,” she said. “And, in fact, there doesn’t have to be God in it.”

Ms. McCabe is a full-fledged clergy member — a term she said was absorbed by the religious — and performs weddings and funerals for people who believe no God binds them together, nor oversees their afterlife.

She calls these ceremonies a celebration of life, rituals and rites that are simply social necessities needed to bring a community together and keep it healthy.

“If you want to think critically about it, you have to think about religion as separate from God.”

Certainly that’s the way humanist societies in British Columbia would rather their respective governments think about the matter.

Last month, the B.C. Humanist Association lost its bid to appoint its own officiants for weddings. The B.C. government denied the organization’s application because it wasn’t, well, a religion. Ian Bushfield, the executive director of the organization, said that was unfair.

“We say we are a religious organization for the purpose of the Marriage Act, but the Marriage Act doesn’t really define what a religious body is,” he said.

The group has until the end of April to decide whether to appeal the decision. Until then, Mr. Bushfield said the humanist organization will continue with memorials (no licence required), child namings and weekly gatherings.

“Our group doesn’t do a lot of song and dance in our meetings, but we do try to build a community of shared values. We have weekly meetings that are more democratic and open,” he said.

‘Religion is, in fact, a social institution. And, in fact, there doesn’t have to be God in it’

Although unaffiliated, Mr. Peters said Calgary’s church is very similar. The tone is serious, with group members discussing how to give back to their community. His wife runs a Sunday school to teach children about how to appreciate their responsibilities as global citizens. Mr. Peters said there are fiscal conservatives among the group, but “I don’t think anyone could seriously be an atheist and still be a social conservative,” Mr. Peters said.

He’d like to devote the group’s efforts to raising money for charity. Mr. Peters said many in the group are fans of Plan International’s Because I Am A Girl campaign to help empower women in developing countries.

Pastor Harry Kelm, who preaches at the Grace Baptist Church in Calgary, said he wonders how an atheist church differs from a social club. He doesn’t believe humans developed religion because they needed community, as Ms. McCabe argues. Rather, he said, God created humans to need fellowship.

“As someone who believes that God created us with this need for connection, I think that we find community in lots of different places,” he said. “I would say even atheists, who don’t admit there is a God, still have that imprint that God created in us in his image.”

Further, Mr. Kelm said: “Atheists have their own religion. Most atheists would disagree, but them mere fact that they’re calling it a church, to me, it’s ironic. They say ‘no we don’t have faith.’ Well, yes you do have faith in a non-God.”

Ethan Clow, host of Radio Freethinker, a Vancouver-based podcast and radio show for skeptics, is intrigued by the idea of an atheist church. But he said he fears church-like rituals can have a psychological effect that can bypass critical thinking.

“My only concern would be focus on rituals and ceremony instead of empathizing rationalism and critical thinking. Building community and having that community bond are important goals, but one of the reasons many atheists leave organized religion is to get away from the rituals and worship and being subject to a leader like a priest.”

‘I would say even atheists, who don’t admit there is a God, still have that imprint that God created in us in his image’

An atheist church may seem novel, but Irving Hexham, professor of religious studies and new religious movements at the University of Calgary, said they’re not new.

“In the 19th century, there was a rather large movement of ‘Rationalist Churches,’ they called them. They were agnostics and atheists and they had circuits of preachers like T.H. Huxley [a period advocate of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution]. They would go around preaching against religion. We seem to be going back to that,” he said.

Yet the Rationalist Churches petered out in the 1930s. Religion and atheism come and go in history, he said. Regardless of how advanced its scientific understanding becomes, humans tend to slide back into religiosity over time, Mr. Hexham said.

“There are questions about death. As long as people die they seek answers for the meaning of life,” he said.

But the nominally Christian upbringing of Tanner Berquist, a 19-year-old who was born in Calgary and began to consider himself an agnostic at the age of 6, was unable to provide comfort for these queries. As an adolescent, Mr. Berquist saw his uncle passed away, prompting him to question the Christian doctrine.

“This doesn’t make any sense, the passing of someone close to me. Why me? What does it mean? And turning to the church didn’t do anything for me. I found support in people, but I didn’t find any answers,” he said. “This led me to question my faith and do more research on some of the scientific claims of the Bible.”

Mr. Berquist joined Mr. Peters’ secular church several months ago.

“There’s a sense of belonging, of knowing we’re not the only ones out there and that it’s OK to question the majority and that questioning things is good,” he said. “Everyone [at the church] knows the feeling of being a black sheep as it were and they’re all really supportive.”